


Practically Perfect: A Misandrist's Tale

by wallflowerdalek



Category: Mary Poppins (1964)
Genre: I Don't Even Know, I'm Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:58:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallflowerdalek/pseuds/wallflowerdalek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How on earth does she do it, that Mary Poppins?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Practically Perfect: A Misandrist's Tale

She woke and knew she’d be gone by the next day. Wrapped in her dressing gown, she sat on the edge of her bed and felt the wind pick up as the sun rose.

In London, in her north-facing window, swaddled in the branches of a beech that luxuriated outside her window, she could not actually see the sun rise. It was a far cry from her first home, where the sunlight seemed to permeate everything and it never got cold enough to snow. But she adapted to the cold, as she’d adapted to the taste of the wind on her body, and now it suited her. These gray city mornings, and rainy days, these bursts of wind so cold they stole your breath and brought the blood to your cheeks.

Blood.

The hunger was there, in the crinkles that appeared around her eyes, the morning before, when she checked her hair in the mirror. She’d started to tilt, to look closer, and Michael had leaped into the room to ask if she was ready, and where they would be going today, and Jane had come in, chewing an apple with her mouth open, and in correcting them she quite forgot her wrinkles.

The children were like little shapely bundles of clay, and she must mold them as much as she could manage in her short stop with them. It was her power, like a potter, to bring the obedient vase from the clay. It worked on adults too, but children were ever so much more mailable.

She had really exercised the power when she was newly wed. At first she only turned his thoughts away, small and subtle corrections, little etches in the clay of his mind. He would raise his hand to her, and then, grumbling, remember that he had forgotten to tie up his mule and rush off to catch the dumb thing. As his considerable anger grew—and perhaps it did so exponentially in relation to her corrections, though certainly his abusive nature was not her fault—as his anger grew so did his concentration on it, and it became harder to form the obstinate mud of his mind. Once, stinking of ale and sweat, he beat her, and she reached out in pain and fear and shattered his vase.

He never spoke again. He became an ugly ogre, a pitiful creature.

Mary smiled when she thought of it. She remembered stepping out of the place they lived, into the hot sand. She remembered the hot blood pouring from her face, a thousand sharp pains across the fresh-turned battlefield of her flesh. And through that she remembered the feeling of a cold, wet wind rustling the ends of her hair, and she remembered thinking that the winds were changing.

It was not a wind that she ever felt there. It belonged in London more than her hot and dry homeland. And though she changed, sometimes dark skin, sometimes light, sometimes red hair and sometimes black; though the children changed, their problems always a new challenge; though London changed, through coal-dust and bomb-filled darkness; though all things change, the wind always came to her cold and wet and electric with power.

And Bert never changed.

Bert had been there at the beginning. He had been her playmate, a sort of a beau, though she had never been interested in him. Where she had been a passion flower, he was a weed—something that creeped, always present and generally overlooked. After she’d broken her husband, he stood there, looking up into the fathomlessly blue sky as the wind took her. When she came down from the clouds for the first time, barefoot and healed and wiping the blood from the edges of her mouth, there he was again, unchanged from when she had last seen him. Like he had barely moved, though the geographic location and time of year were completely different.

As she got ready to go, that night, Michael asked if she loved him.

And what would happen to me, may I ask, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?

It was a good lie, but it was a lie, all a lie. Of course she loved them. She loved each one. It was a restless, foggy love, lasting forever but unable to really penetrate her heart. Once she worried that she would never be able to really love, as if love were a switch that she had but was broken, as if love were the stuff of silly romance books, as if there were anything real at all about love. The dramatic thought, that she couldn’t really love, gave way to the cool and comfortable realization that she just didn’t want to. She had tried love once, but look where that got her. Countless broken bones, and a single broken vase. And who could she love honestly, she who could shape minds like golems from the earth? How could she ever trust their love, really?

Perhaps she even loved Bert, in her own way. She had never tried to reach into his mind. He was off limits, somehow. She didn’t really want to know. She didn’t need to know Bert’s secret.

And if she really thought of it (and she only did in the clouds, in the wet wet wind) she wasn’t always sure if she didn’t want to reach into his mind, or if perhaps he didn’t want her to. As if he—as if he could stop her, without her even knowing she was stopped.

Practically perfect in every way. Practically, and in the ways she was not perfect, practical. Practicality was necessary, especially when one was presented with indelicate tasks.

The sun rose as she finished the victim, gulping the hot, rushing blood in the most unladylike fashion. The wrinkles next to her eyes smoothed out, the flush rose back to her cheeks, and her toes and fingers were brilliantly warm. She licked the drops from her lips delicately, and she remembered again, as she always forgot, that she didn’t know what Bert did. How. Bert, who she always forgot, who she never reached into, who never aged, who never changed. He was always the same, the same old Bert, the same old blue eyes hunting her out among the clouds.

The wind gave a cold, wet cry as it whooped over the earth, and she rose again.


End file.
